Fake News!

Source

In this blog post, we are going to discuss the topic of fake news and how the news media often only informs you the things that they are bias toward.

In the data table above, one pattern that I notice is the that when comparing between "The news media" and "The news media you use most often", the percentage of "The news media you use most often" is always higher than "The news media". This make lots of sense because people are often bias toward what they watch and everyone has their favorite shows. People will not watch the things that doesn't share the same belief as they do. For example, even though there is a lot less social media coverage that are in the favor of the Republicans (bottom graph), a lot of people and especially the Republicans will choose to watch them because in their mind, those sources "protect democracy", "are moral", "are willing to admit their mistakes" and "care about the people they report on". People will feel bias toward the things that they like. But when in reality, the percentage of those qualities in the new sources that are in the favor of the Republican party are not nearly half as high as they thought.

Another pattern that I notice in the data above is that the news media of the Democratic Party tends to have higher quality than those of the Republicans. In the data above, the percentage of the qualities of the Democratic Party media like "protect democracy", "are moral", "are willing to admit their mistakes" and "care about the people they report on" have a lot higher percentage than those of the Republicans and Independent's news media. This might be because there are a lot more democratic news media (bottom data) and this might have influence the general audience's mind since the Democratic Party is all about the people and because they show the problem of the general audience in their new sources, the people think they are better than the news of the Republicans.

These patterns I notice show the large impact of the news media on influencing the people's ideology and how favoritism play a part in the people's choice in where the people get their new source from. Because there are a lot more democratic news, those news are generally regarded as beneficial for America and the people. But at the same time, for the people that do not belief in the Democrats and their ideology, they will view the news that have the same belief as they do to be just as good or even better than those of the Democrats.